The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is the first game in the educational software series created by Chris Hancock and Scot Osterweil of TERC. There are three titles in the series: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Zoombinis Mountain Rescue, and Zoombinis Island Odyssey.

The game is based around the "Zoombinis", a race of small blue creatures which are depicted with varying eyes, noses, hair, and feet. They are peaceful and successful, living on a small island called Zoombini Isle. Their lives are interrupted by a race called the Bloats, who offer to expand trade routes and improve the Zoombinis' quality of life; instead they take advantage of the situation and enslave the Zoombinis. The Zoombinis therefore decide to flee and search for a new home, and on their journey they encounter a variety of logic puzzles which the player must solve.

Features of the Zoombinis

The puzzles involve the physical features of the Zoombinis as part of the solution. For example, in the puzzle 'Allergic Cliffs', the player is given a choice of 2 bridges, each of which will allow Zoombinis to pass only if they have certain combinations of features such as 'red nose', but as the difficulty increases, the combinations will require more than one body part such as nose and hair making the puzzles gradually harder to work out. The list of available features is as follows:

In total, the number of unique combinations is 625, and the player has to save 625 Zoombinis in total. The player can opt to have up to two identical Zoombinis in play if they prefer, meaning that in a single game, not all Zoombini combinations have to be used.

Name changes

The original release of the game by Broderbund Europe in March 1996 came in three languages: British (v1.0BR), French (v1.0FR), and German (v1.0DE). The US division of Broderbund made some minor changes and released a US version (v1.1) in December 1996. As part of the US release they chose to change the names of several areas of the game as follows: